According to David Gelernter, the desktop metaphor is obsolete. He wants to move beyond space - to time.

David Gelernter is looking for his pipe.
It's hidden somewhere in his office, among the leaning towers of books, academic reprints, old newspapers, and empty Diet Sprite cans. He ducks and whirls his head around until he spots it on a bookshelf, right next to a copy of the programming linguistics textbook he cowrote, and gives a satisfied smile. But as he fiddles with the pipe, twisting it around and tapping it against the desk, then looking blankly at a bag of tobacco as if unsure what to do, the smile becomes sheepish. He mutters something about affectations and puts the pipe down.

The 41-year-old Yale computer science professor is accustomed to being at the forefront of his field. He codeveloped a successful programming language for parallel computing back when parallel computing was still considered impractical, and he worked on techniques for data mining years before it became a buzzword. But his current project is the most far afield yet. Instead of researching faster hardware or more efficient algorithms, Gelernter is examining the human side of the equation. His team at Yale is studying things like cognitive psychology, design - social sciences, even. And sometimes,
he looks like an actor trying to learn a new role.

The project that Gelernter and several of his graduate students are working on is called Lifestreams, and it may completely change how we manage information. Today, our view of cyberspace is shaped by a 20-year-old metaphor in which files are documents, documents are organized into folders, and all are littered around the flatland known as the desktop. Lifestreams takes a completely different approach: instead of organizing by space, it organizes by time. It is a diary rather than a desktop.

This is a more radical vision than it seems. For years, attempts to replace the desktop have been based on simply taking it to the next dimension - the third dimension. Even the cyberspace of science fiction remains profoundly spatial. Recall William Gibson's description: "A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

Gelernter's group takes Gibson's cyberspace and twists it around the temporal axis. You hear this in its description of Lifestreams: "Every document you've ever created or received stretches before you in a time-ordered stream, reaching from right now backward to the date you were born. You can sit back and watch new documents arrive: they're plunked down at the head of the stream. You browse the stream by running your cursor down it - touch a document in the display and it pops out far enough for you to glance at its contents. You can go back in time or go to the future and see what you're supposed to be doing next week or next decade. Your entire cyberlife is right there in front of you."

This view of the future is startling, partly because the idea is so obvious. It seems incredible that a good system for organizing chronologically doesn't already exist. But, as anyone who has tried to keep track of many different versions of a document and has had to resort to intricate filenames like letter.4/12.sgs.b knows, today's interfaces practically ignore the temporal dimension.

Almost as radical as the ideas of Lifestreams is that the project was developed by a computer science professor. This breaks with years of academic tradition, which insists that developing practical, easy-to-use applications isn't real research. It's hard to predict whether Lifestreams will have the impact of, say, Xerox PARC's desktop. But just the fact that Lifestreams came from a university, rather than a company or research lab, reveals plenty about where computing is headed.

Taking the S out of CS

"Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work," MIT's Nicholas Negroponte replies when I ask him why UI has historically been ignored by academics. The real men (yes, they were mainly men) studied topics like compilers, systolic arrays, and partitioning algorithms. This was hard science, and it involved numbers, mathematical proofs, and empirical evidence. User interface? That was on par with
astrology.